Trinity Help
Trinity Help is a brickfilm by Trevor Boyd and Steve Ilett. It is a frame-by-frame recreation of the "Bullet Time" scene from . The creators made a point of achieving everything in camera, going so far as to not even rely on wire removal. Roughly 440 hours of work were put in to the video.[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDe4v318f64 Trinity Help on YouTube] It is the second and final brickfilm by the creators, following an animated construction of the LEGO set 7656 General Grievous' Starfighter.legoMatrix.com website In the media Trinity Help was featured by multiple websites, including Wired.com and Boing Boing. Behind the scenes gallery Openinga-t.jpg| "As you can see from the thumbnail here, the letters turned out to be way too chunky, so each character line in the falling rain opening became a single 1x1 tile. If we'd kept it like this, we would have to have worked with an animation frame that is essentially only 9x4 in resolution. The animation would just look like random movement." Scene01b.jpg| "The totally awesome Blu-Tack mount. Infinite degrees of variability between the start and end, and sticky enough to survive the animation procedure. Watch the hot lights, though. Things can get pretty droopy once temperatures start to spike. And check out that horrible walk cycle. Why on earth does the agent have both arms forward? Is he some sort of zombie?" Scene01a.jpg| "The technically nifty but woeful Bionical mount. You also get a glimpse of the rifle rig for Neo. It was an antenna with Blu-Tack on it, which was blocked from the camera's view by Neo himself. Worked a treat. I tell you, we should have had shares in the Blu-Tack company - we probably used our own body weight in the stuff." Scene02a.jpg| "Trinity and her mounting platform. As you can see, we spared no expense with this set. Indistinct backdrop combined with only a partially-built building. Your guess is as good as mine as to why she has a gun in her hand." Scene02b.jpg| "Here we see Steve adjusting Trinity for a shot. As you can see, the Lego ruler guides weren't exactly technical. It's basically just a long track that the ruler could slide along. If I remember correctly, we drew some pencil marks on the baseplate somewhere that we could match to the graduations on the ruler." Scene03a.jpg| "Here is the spinning rig we had Neo mounted on. We had to build him up on a stand as our tripod wouldn't go any lower. The background printout looks weird here - it only had to be tiny, but we surrounded it with the same picture at a different size just in case we got our cropping size wrong and the white border appeared. We could have printed it big to start with, but we wanted the clouds to appear the right size. I don't think it would have made any difference, upon reflection. The clouds would have looked gray and blurry no matter what resolution we printed them at." Scene04a.jpg| "This is a test shot we did so we could get the scale right on the printout for the backdrop. It was sometimes amusing (and at times surprising) to see how small a background we needed in some shots, given the distance from the camera to the target. It's shots like this that makes us wish we'd spent a little bit more time matching the bricks in our buildings, maybe even washing them. Then again, dirty bricks and big construction gaps is a Lego tradition from way back, surely? I like that giant red tap handle too, for some reason. It's way more prominent than the original, and obviously the Lego scale makes it huge. But I like it." Scene05a.jpg| "Here you can see a closeup of the rig we used for the agent separation. It's a little indistinct because of the black agent torsos and the black Lego parts. There are various hinges and swing mounts in there to allow the agent copies to lean forward and back and in and out. You can also see evidence of our early crimes against stop-frame animation humanity over there on the far left. The plate with the chimney on it was not attached to the rest of the set. Rule number one says that everything must be fixed in place! As we said earlier, we bumped this during animation and had to fix it in post." Scene06a.gif| "Here you have a 400k gif animation showing the colour variations from just having the TV on. Here's a tip - don't do that. You really don't notice it when you're filming, but as you can see it's pretty harsh. Part of the problem is the tiny LCD on the camera. It hides a lot of sins that only become apparent when you see the full size photograph. Focus issues and reflections are easily missed on the LCD, too. Another issue is the time taken between photos. You totally forget what the last image looked like, so you can't compare colour from one shot to the next. If we had a proper stop-frame camera set up, presumably we'd be able to switch between frames we'd taken and the current shot to see any discrepancies. No such luxury on our budget." Scene07a.jpg| "Here's a view of the rig we used. The rear two agents are on hinged brackets so they can lean over and move up and down. And hey - you can get a better view of the fake reflection we put into the background printout. Unfortunately, you can also see the huge seam running up the middle of the printout, which stands out a little in our movie. We toyed briefly with the idea of making a true reflective surface on a big Lego building with glass or something, but it would have been a lot of work and you'd see the camera in it anyway. That idea was shelved pretty quickly." Scene08a.gif| "This was the 5th scene we shot, as it was going to be fairly straight-forward. The tricky part turned out to be getting the correct shadow across Neo's face. In the original he has a pretty obvious shadow that basically cuts his face in half down the middle. We managed to duplicate this with a second light source, but the light we used to get it was the wrong colour. A bit of time in post production managed to even that out, as you can see in the 200k gif animation below. The Matrix was very green or brown, so we tweaked the colours over to that." Scene09a.jpg| "Here you can see one of the full frames before cropping. Sets don't get much simpler than this - a tiny piece of paper stuck onto a Lego hinge so we could get the angle right for it to face the camera. And no, the set is NOT built on compressed tuna fish." Scene10a.jpg| "Here you can just make out the thread suspending the gun, looped over Trevor's thumb. With the pale background you can spot it relatively easily, even in the thumbnail view, but against a dark or busy one it really disappears. Video compression and movement in our final movie also helped disguise it." Scene11a.jpg| "Here you can see the sticky tape rig we built, and how it fit together. The tape was mounted between the gun and the agent's face, in an effort to make just his face and the background blurry and keep the gun in sharp focus. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this didn't work at all." Scene11b.jpg| "And here we have the salt and pepper shaker head balanced on a Foxtel remote control off in the distance. As you can see, it's not really awful, and somewhat amusing. Unfortunately it was just too silly, and quite obvious unless you're squinting. Don't ask if the head was for the salt or the pepper, we've no idea. He could have used a shave, though." Scene12a.jpg| "Here's Steve filing down a small lip inside the collar so it can slide over the main column, which can be seen on the right. In a perfect world the collar would have had a circular inner shape, and a nice square-edged outer shape for us to mount things to, perhaps with a nice wide upper surface. Unfortunately we had to make do, and it caused us a few issues." Scene12b.jpg| "Here we can see Trevor has finished screwing the mounting bracket onto the collar to hold the boom arm. The boom can be seen on the table in front of him - it's some PVC pipe and some elbow connectors. Basically we needed a mount that would come straight out from the collar, up high enough to clear our set, and then come back in over the set with our camera on the end. To make up for not having that square outer shape, we've mounted a bracket here to hopefully give the boom some support." Scene12c.jpg| "On the left is the partially finished product. The horizontal pipe sticks out to the left in order to counter-weight the other side, which will have another L-shaped PVC pipe construction attached to it to go up and back over the set. The set itself will sit on the top of the central column. We also figured we could hang some weight off the left side to counter-balance it more if need be." Scene12d.jpg| "Here you can see we have added a large MDF board that the set will sit on and a cupboard drawer rail that allows the camera to move in and out. On the end of that slide rail you can see the Manfraudo Mofo (see scene 16) which has been altered slightly and screwed onto the end, becoming the Manfraudo Arc. Our homemade stuff is nothing if not versatile. None of the pipes are actually glued together, they are just jammed in there real good. You can also see that we've fitted an indicator on the collar and a band with some measuring guides on it. This is so we can track where the camera is rotationally around the set." Scene12e.jpg| "At this point major construction was pretty much completed, or at least so we thought. You can see we've added a bigger printout around the main column, allowing us to track height as well. For any given frame in the animation we can rotate the camera to the correct position for that shot by lining the cross-hairs up with the right spot. The prisms there were for a quick test of taking photos with the camera in odd positions, hoping to be able to get it lower to the set. This didn't work." Scene12f-t.jpg| "As you can see here in the original movie footage, each trail consists of a sine wave of circular lens-like shapes, that grow bigger as they age. That is, later trails are skinnier than the longer-lived earlier trails. In order to reproduce this effect for our scene, we thought we'd have to go to something not made by the glorious Lego corporation. As luck would have it, we found some sequins that came in the right sizes, and some flower-arranging wire to string them on." Scene12r-t.jpg| "We tried a few different combinations of sequins until we hit upon a design that looked pretty good. We created a few strands of these, which was time-consuming and fiddly, but at least we could sit comfortably to do it. When you looked down the length of the wire it looked pretty darn nifty, to be honest. Here you can see a quick test we made with a suitably dynamic movie-style camera angle." Scene12h.jpg| "Whilst pulling the wires backwards though the foam block, as you can see here, we had to keep the sequins from dropping onto the set. It's hard to fish them out from around the models without disturbing them. The method we chose for this was to catch them in a spoon as they fell off the end. Nothing fancy, but it worked. You can also see our scale printout on the base there. This was printed out to match the size of the Lego, and the circles are the same size as the studs. The different coloured pieces on the far left are to indicate pieces of the building that sits there, and the large gray area is the platform that the helicopter sits on." Scene12j.jpg| "And here you can see the new tilt mechanism. The Manfraudo Arc has been transformed again, with the addition of an arm through which a long screw has been tapped. This allowed us to wind the camera up and down with ease, and with as fine an adjustment as needed. The upwards-facing screw poking through the perspex on the right attaches to the standard tripod mount in the bottom of the camera. A wire pointer was Blu-Tacked onto the top of the screw to indicate what direction it was facing and we just kept a track of how many turns were on it at all times." Scene12k.jpg| "Here you can see the gantry that we built to pull this off. As you can see, it's a piece of timber with four screw-down legs that lock into the base of the set. It can sit fairly sturdily on 3 out of the 4 legs, so that allows us to screw a leg up out of the way as the camera swings by, and drop it back down into the set once the camera has passed. With 3 legs always on the set, we figured it would be stable enough, and the movements of the legs up and down didn't shake the set TOO much." Scene12m.gif| "As you can see in this 600k GIF animation from the film, the final bullet flies into the camera with the agent and building behind him all in shot. This meant we couldn't mount anything off-screen or behind the agent without it being obvious. Bear in mind that our camera could not get as low as the one in the original movie, so our agent would be quite visible." Scene12l.jpg| "You can see here that we tried mounting the bullet on a wire that was occluded by the bullet itself. You can make out the shot in the LCD on the back of the camera there, and the wire cannot be seen at all. This worked great, but turned out to be really hard to animate. Without being able to view the last frame we'd shot and the new one, we couldn't easily tell how smooth our animation was. After all, we had to move the mounting block for the wire along a weird path that kept the wire blocked from the camera's view as the bullet travelled. Click on the image to the left to see the full size picture and the shot taken by the camera from the proper angle. Works quite well." Scene12n.jpg| "It turns out that a huge bag of brand new clear parabolas and round singles and stuff costs very little. We're talking way less than $100 for more of this stuff than we needed. We did some testing and came up with a few different trail designs, but in the end we decided against using the largest parabolic dishes you can see here. They just didn't suit the scale of everything else in the scene. We didn't use those big windows (Trevor just wanted to buy those for something else), but we used a couple of tiny ones as stands for when the trails got too long. It's possible to see one in our movie, but it goes by pretty quick." Scene12o.jpg| "On the left here you can see some testing that was underway for both the Lego trails and the final bullet suspension. Whilst the thread the bullet is dangling from is just visible in this shot, I'm sure you can appreciate how much harder it is to see than in the previous scene we showed it off that had a pale background (see scene 10). At this time we were using a translucent yellow group of round single blocks for the bullet, but this soon changed to the solid yellow cylinder you see in the finished movie. You can also see 3 different sized trails, and we ended up not using the biggest. You can see the agent with a bunch of them attached to his gun, and it looks like he's a Street Fighter character or something. Hadoken!" Scene12p.jpg| "In this photo you can see a few points of interest. At the bottom you can see the main column of the OCR has a printout wrapped around it that shows the frame number, as well as the height. The cross-hairs line up with the pencil line there to give us the right height for the camera. On the top of the set you can see a long paper tube with some clear Lego poking out of it. We used these tubes to align our trails, as well as to support them when we were removing them from the scene during the animation. We could also sight down them to ensure the trail was pointing in the right direction." Scene12_4a.jpg| "Here is the gear in Steve's garage. On the left is one of the workshop lights we used, pointed upwards to bounce the light off the white ceiling. This gave us the soft lighting that was needed for this scene. At the bottom is the OCR, but without the cameras mounted or the set in place just yet. At the back you can see a HP netbook and external monitor showing the original video frames. We used this to not only see what the current scene was, but to also step forward and backwards through the video to see how the animation progressed. This was invaluable, as often the differences between frames was almost invisible, and you needed to know where it was all heading." Scene12_4b.jpg| "Here you can see one of our test shots to see where we could put supports in for the bullet trails. They could only be made so long before the agent could no longer hold them without sagging, and with the camera moving around we had to be mindful of which end we could support them from. The clear column with the yellow bullet on top was a position marker for where the edge of the visible frame was. We were often amazed at what it was exactly that the camera could NOT see. You can also see a new mount on the front of the camera with a screw running through it. This was a jig Trevor made in an effort to fix the camera in place rotationally around the screw that mounted it to the main arm. We needed this so we could re-align the camera when we had to disconnect it to replace the battery." Scene12_4c.jpg| "Here's a test we did for the tricky part where the camera has to pass through the bullet trails. Obviously we couldn't do this in the same way they could do it with computer graphics in the original film. For ours, we decided we could smoothly raise and lower the trails out of the way, allowing the camera to pass by. We had to do a lot of tests to see where to start and stop this process, and to see if we could even get away with it. It wasn't a perfect solution visually, but we really couldn't think of a better way. We had to be careful where the thread was tied onto the trails so the camera couldn't see them, and we pulled it off fairly well. You can just make it out in our movie if you know what to look for, but it is in no way obvious." Scene12_4d.jpg| "This was some more planning of camera angles and heights. You may also notice a green wire hanging off the back of the building with the pipes there on the right. It was used as a support for a bullet trail that came past the pipes on that building. Another trail used a clear window as a support (which can be seen at the bottom of the shot), and you can make it out in our finished movie if you know where to look. We had to use supports that were as invisible as possible as they would be in view of the camera. The Lego construction at the bottom right (with a paper #5 on it) was one of several height guides we used for various bullet-trails, when they couldn't be seen by the camera." Scene12_4e.jpg| "Here you can see the gantry and how it sits on the set. The last support arm on the right is raised so that the camera can swing past. You can also see the Blu-Tack "parachute" that we stuck on the back of the agent. We had glued his arm into position to better hold the weight of the bullet-trail, but we needed to strengthen his waist without locking it into one position. This worked well enough. At the bottom you can see the height/frame guide on the OCR support column. The curving line shows the change in height of the camera for any given frame number. Steve also needs to get that arcade machine in the background working properly. He's put that off for far too long already." Scene12_4f.jpg| "In this shot you can see the paper guide tubes we used for some of the trails. These were aligned with where we wanted the bullet trail to go, and afixed in place with Lego stands. We could then use these to both sight down, making sure the agent was firing the bullet in the correct direction, and once long enough the trail could be slid through the tube, ensuring that it was removed from the scene in a smooth straight line. Worked great so long as the camera was never in a position to either see the guide, or get in its way. At this point it was 8pm, and we were taking a dinner break." Scene13a.jpg| "Here's a view of one of our full frames before editing, where you can see the pink and black stuff on the leg quite clearly. If you pause our video in just the right spot, you'll see the great lump of amateurish Pink-Tack on his leg that's supposed to look like a puff of blood. It looks like chewing gum, according to everyone who sees it. If you want to play a fun game, try and work out which bullet it is that hits his leg in the original movie footage. On second thought don't - it really isn't that much fun. That whole bullet-dodging scene is a nightmare to track." Scene14a.jpg| "Here you can see a full frame before editing it down for the movie. That just looks ridiculous. It's as though some weird newspaper has blown up against him, or a lump of old hand-towels. Still, through the magic of extreme close-up and fleeting glimpses, it is transformed into a puff of smoke. Such is the majesty of stop-frame animation. Or something like that." Scene15a.jpg| "Here is a view of the set up for this. Not much more to say about it, except you can see the "rifle" that Neo drops in the very first scene. That big long crane thing to the right of Trinity got shortened in other shots so we could fit it on the set without bumping into the background printouts. It seems to be part of the window cleaning apparatus on top of the high-rise building the original was shot on. Trevor located it on Google Maps, and it's this one. The crane has scooted around to the bottom right corner in that link when we last looked." Scene15b.jpg| "If you aren't convinced this is the right building, and the shape does seem odd when you look down on it compared to how you think it should be, here's an image Trevor put together with some shots from the movie, showing where all the buildings are. It all triangulates back to that one building, so it's pretty conclusive." Scene16a.jpg| "Here is the scene along with the view that the camera sees. You can also see some of the "Manfraudo Mofo" camera mount that Trevor built. This was a copy and parody of a Manfrotto Modo mini-tripod that allowed us to get the camera low and stable without needing a tripod. The hinges front and back allowed it to tilt and we Blu-Tacked it down for professional-grade stability. It's not like professional industries don't run on duct tape - we've just got things scaled down a bit. And no, that's not an agent minifig being used for the shadow. I'd be impressed if anyone could have told that from the final movie footage." Scene17b.jpg| "Here's the background image with the pinhole in it (well, more of a "penhole") and the highly technical mounting system for the light. The running sheet there shows we were tracking the frame numbers in reverse (as we shot this one in reverse) and the title says "S17T03" for "scene 17 take 3"." Scene17a.jpg| "The photo here shows the placement of the light for the actual filming - right up against the backdrop. You can also see that same running sheet has a notation at the bottom indicting this was a take with a pinhole in the backdrop. We had tried it without one prior to this, and were disappointed with the results." Scene18a.jpg| "There was no real animation in this scene, as the original footage is just the agent talking. We tapped him gently between frames so that it wouldn't just look like a still image. We never planned to animate mouths in any of this. There are only 6 words spoken in the entire thing, and this is the only scene that is purely dialogue. Lego is Lego." Scene18b.jpg| "Both the photos show the same scene, but from different angles. You can see the massive green Lego plate being used as a shield to stop the light from the TV in the living room reflecting off the agent. You can also see we've re-purposed the failed Bionical animation rig from scene 01 to hold our light. Looks pretty serious, hey?" Scene19a.jpg| "Here's the set, showing off that crazy rivet-based rig and the helicopter tail. And oh look, our light's a Dell! Light was important again for this scene, as there were some obvious shadows (or at least an obvious light-source direction) that needed to be duplicated. This scene was somewhat annoying to animate, what with the gun being pushed into the agent's head. We had two things moving against one another, and that's just another level of complexity for us amateurs." Scene20a.jpg| "A nice photo of Trinity holding her gun. Unfortunately the background is all blurry, and we wanted to match the clarity of the original footage. You can just barely make out some of the Yellow-Tack holding her arm on at the top and bottom of her ball-joint. You can also see hairs and dust stuck to her - the bane of macro-shooting animators the world over, I'm sure." Scene20b.jpg| "Here is the set we ended up using, and the distances involved. Why our background has that brown tinge to it and why we didn't do anything about it is anyones guess. I suppose we were just happy to shoot the scene and didn't care so much about colouration. I'm sure the Rider-back playing cards were there for a reason, but it escapes me right now. The jeweller's screwdriver was for animation or tweaking without bumping the camera or the backdrop." Scene21a.jpg| "This was our first matte test shot. I think I can safely say it would be an understatement to say this was rubbish. Oh how we laughed. It's like Trinity has sprung an oil leak or something. In our defence, we spent almost no time in producing that backdrop as we just wanted to try it and see if it was even close to working. Having said that, we made a slightly better backdrop for the next photo you see here, so we obviously thought it had a non-zero chance of working." Scene21b.jpg| "Here we have a slightly improved cropped version. This is still pretty poor, but I don't need to tell you that. Mind you, try squinting at it and it gets pretty darn good. Perhaps it would have worked okay if our target market were in old folk's homes or something? Cataracts probably increase the quality a hundred-fold." Scene21c.jpg| "This was our perspex test shot. It looked promising, but ultimately failed. It also features our early helicopter design. We later changed the tail rotor and added an extra bit to the top of the main rotor to better match the real thing. We also made the decision to disconnect the main rotor slightly and lean it over. The blades in the original movie footage droop a lot, and we wanted to get closer to that. Anyway, you can see a reflection of Trinity's head in the perspex, as well as the ground, so just imagine what it would have been like to film." Scene21d.jpg| "Our nylon thread rig. The movement was supposed to be animated via the Bionical arm at the top, which was clamped to the chair with the red towel on it. The paper was used to jam it in place. It was just too wobbly to work. I defy you, however, to spot the thread in this shot. The black rectangle at the top right was a cut-down VHS tape cover we used as a shield on the light. This scene had some pretty specific lighting requirements, and it was tricky to do it and keep the light from shining directly into the lens, flaring it out." Scene21e.jpg| "Here is our attempt with using a thin rod to mount the agent to. It's thinner and so easier to obscure with clever camera angles, but was too hard to control. The rod would slide about a bit over the Lego studs and not stay where we wanted it to. The light in the bottom right was being used to test the "agent dying and turning back into a normal dead citizen" glow. It was just too hard to halo light the agent with it so we gave up after a few short tests. Most people probably didn't even notice that it happens in the film anyway." Scene21f.jpg| "This image shows the thick rod we tried. This was wrapped with rubber bands and Blu-Tack, which gave it grip and stickiness on the Lego surface. Unfortunately it seemed to have a mind of it's own and often settled into a position it preferred, rather than the one we wanted. Very annoying to set up the agent how you want him and have him slowly drift into another position as the rod reasserted itself. At this point our stuff appears to be sitting on top of a Little Mermaid play set, but I could be wrong. The agent is also getting a right snoot-full of gun, by the looks." Scene21g.jpg| "Here you can see the Lego axle rod. The Technic gearing rig is obscured by the helicopter, unfortunately. It was essentially a very small frame that allowed the mount to slide across it. You twiddled something that turned some worm gears and the rod rotated and moved along. Very nifty. This is very much a shot of our final design, with the lighting and everything in place. It was devilishly hard to get the lighting to match the original, and this was about as close as we could get." Scene21h.jpg| "And finally we have some close-ups on the mounting of the agent to the axle rod. As you can see there is some wire wrapped around his waist, which is then attached to the axle. A spot of Black-Tack covers it up and no-one's any the wiser. " Scene21i.jpg tech.jpg| "A ridiculous amount of time and effort was put into developing custom tools to help with the production." tips-t.jpg| "As clueless as we were about making stop motion lego films, we did learn something." References Category:Brickfilms filmed in Australia Category:Brickfilm pages with behind the scenes galleries Category:Archived brickfilms